This volume brings together some of the characteristic writings of John Andrew Gallagher, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the British Academy, who died in Cambridge on 5 March 1980. Jack Gallagher was born on 1 April 1919, the only child of Joseph and Adeline Gallagher. From Birkenhead Institute, he came to Trinity in 1936 as a Scholar in History. At the outbreak of the war, he immediately enlisted in the Royal Tank Regiment and saw service in North Africa, Italy and Greece. He returned to Cambridge to complete his studies and was elected a Fellow at Trinity in 1948 for his research on the British penetration of West Africa. He taught History at Cambridge, becoming University Lecturer in Colonial Studies in 1950 and Dean of Trinity in 1960. In 1963 he was elected Beit Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth in Oxford and Fellow of Balliol College. In 1971 he returned to Cambridge to take up the Chair of Imperial and Naval History; in the following year he was elected Vice-Master of Trinity, a position he held until his death. In 1974 he delivered the Ford Lectures in Oxford on ‘The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire’ and later that year he gave the Wiles Lectures at Belfast.